The two books under review add to our understanding of Soviet Jewry by switching focus from the state and its machinations to the consummate victim of that state, the Jew. In both books we encounter ordinary people who would likely not appear in standard historical accounts. In Alice Nakhimovsky's study the innovation lies in the sources: she conducted personal interviews with several of the figures she presents. These individuals did time in Soviet prisons and after rehabilitation returned to Moscow, where the American scholar met with them in the 1980s and 1990s. Grinberg makes a groundbreaking innovation by filling out the character of a secular Soviet-Jewish identity and explaining how it was that many of these people managed to arrive at their self-understanding. He concentrates on the Brezhnev period, when Jewish culture and practice had already been so diminished through generations of repression that most Jews had little acquaintance with it. He claims that those who ultimately attained Jewish consciousness gleaned information from books (consequently the bookshelf of the title) to piece together a Jewish identity.
Both of these books raise issues of importance to the field of Slavic studies in offering new and revised perspectives on Jews and Jewish life under communism. Additionally, their appearance today makes sense as both Jewish studies in Slavic lands has matured as a subfield and an ongoing interest in all things Stalin continues. Perhaps this moment allows us to revisit the subject of Soviet Jewry more generally: How should we judge a society that was cruel to Jewry as a religion, ethnic collective, and to individual Jews who asserted a Jewish identity, while providing survival, and at times even a good life for many Jews?Footnote 1
Both books start in medias res in different periods of Soviet Russia, but both permit us to reconsider what Jewish life in Soviet Russia was “really” like. Was it as bad as we have been told by certain rabbis, community leaders, and earlier Jewish historians? The testimony of Jewish professionals and activists (and their representatives) who were persecuted gives us one version of Soviet Jewish life. However, there are other versions, admittedly that echo the lines of revisionists, such as Andrew Sloin and Deborah Yalen, who claim that the Soviet Union brought indisputable gains for some people and especially those who embraced the Revolution and the goals of communism.Footnote 2 In this context it is possible to argue that many Jews were aided in the decade following World War I, when unemployment and starvation throughout Europe hit shtetls hard. Collective economic life and educational and career opportunities in the early years of the state helped provide a brighter future than Jews experienced in many other places.Footnote 3 Additionally—and it would be wrong not to acknowledge it—many of the Soviet leaders came from Jewish backgrounds and owed a debt of gratitude to the state for their powerful positions. Soviet culture, too, provided a path for Jewish writers, artists, and musicians to earn a living. For a time, Jewish life in the Soviet Union saw a kind of secular renaissance, albeit outside of Judaism as a religion and without an independent Jewish collective. This evidence leads to the image of the Soviet state as at once a friend and an enemy, depending on what kind of Jew you were and what you were able to give the state—as paradoxical as this dichotomous formulation seems.
Another group of positive voices include survivors of World War II who owed their lives to the Soviet Union. Jews survived in Soviet Russia in much greater percentages than in Poland, as many fled east to relative safety.Footnote 4 Jews served in the Red Army and, despite antisemitism among soldiers and officers, fought hard to defeat Nazi Germany. For these and other Jews, the Soviet Union meant minimally the chance to survive. Subsequent decades brought different challenges to Jews regarding the state's tolerance (or lack of it) and the costs to the state for its policies. Rather than continuing my historical outline, here is a good place to turn to an examination of the books under review as The Dream of Social Justice and Bad Moral Luck opens precisely with the Stalin period.
Alice Nakhimovsky is the Distinguished Chair in Jewish Studies and professor of Russian at Colgate University. She has a long track record of innovative books on Russian-Jewish history. In fact, she might be viewed as a pioneer as her first book, Russian Jewish Literature and Identity (1992), was an early attempt to treat the Jew as a literary trope in Russian literature.Footnote 5 In her latest book, she applies her critical skills to recounting the lives and fates of eight Jewish subjects of Stalin. Many of her subjects were caught up in the purges in the 1930s and then the anti-Jewish persecutions of the late 1940s and early 1950s. A list of the famous and not-so-famous interlocutors reveals her focus. She relates the life and fate of Doba-Mera Medvedeva, Leib Kvitko, Solomon Lozovskii, Lina Shtern, Nadezhda and Aleksandr Ulaovskii, Mary Leder, Lilianna Lungina, and Vasilii Grossman. She speaks from her subjects’ point of view, explaining how they got involved with the communist regime and how they were unable to escape its fate. Besides interviews, Nakhimovsky has combed the memoir literature to fill in gaps in the stories, thus providing an account that is both moving and historically accurate.
A good example is the case of Lena Stern, who was born in tsarist Russia and, like so many Jews in the 1890s, was denied access to higher education and so traveled to western Europe, where she received her PhD in Geneva. Her innovative and prolific work in biology earned her a professorship in Switzerland, a rarity for a woman even in western Europe. In the mid-1920s, she was lured back to Soviet Russia with promises of research independence and laboratory funding. She came under suspicion by the NKVD and was arrested in the late 1930s, only returning to Moscow after Stalin's death. Stern's story belongs to a special subgenre of communist victim literature—individuals who believed in the state and made the error of returning—for instance, Prince Dmitry Mirsky and the Yiddish scholar Nochem Stif.
While Yiddish writers such as Leib Kvitko, David Bergelson, and Peretz Markish attempted to unite artistic independence and political loyalty, they did not always succeed in flying under the radar. A folk writer and successful children's book author, Kvitko is a major figure in Nakhimovsky's book, which describes his fall from success due to his publication of mocking portraits of communist officials. Thanks, however, to the influence of Kornei Chukovskii, the famous Soviet children's writer, Kvitko recovered and managed to retain his status. But again, during WWII Kvitko was enlisted into the Jewish Antifascist Committee and, when the government perceived the committee as a political threat, he and others were put on trial. Despite all his efforts to serve the state, Kvitko was executed with the other members of the committee in 1952.
Nakhimovsky takes us into the dark days of Stalinism, where husbands and wives prepared a bag of belongings to have at the ready in case of an arrest, and throughout the night listened for the steps of the NKVD. Despite common sense, some, although not all, continued to believe in the Party's infallibility. Nakhimovsky writes about Kvitko during the 1948 trial of the Jewish Antifascist Committee:
Kvitko, in fact, gives ample testimony to the state of his soul, which was one of unconditional devotion to the Party. Chukovsky's statement about him—that he was in love with the Party— is borne out by what he says about himself: ‘They say that I wormed my way into the Party but that's not true, that can be checked with facts. In the October Revolution I didn't lose anything. I didn't have any kind of property, all my family had died of tuberculosis, and in the Revolution I became a human being and everything I possess I obtained because of the October Revolution.’ His calendar is the Bolshevik calendar: ‘The day of the October Revolution will always stay in my memory as the most joyful and happy holiday of my life’ (150).
This strategy of engaging with the direct expression of her subjects characterizes Nakhimovsky's identification with them and her empathy for their misfortune at the hands of Stalin.
Of course, political misfortune was not unique to the Soviet Union's 2.5 million Jews. For readers of a certain age, this book may seem a pale reflection of an entire genre that gleamed from the windows of bookstores at the height of the Cold War. The stories of communism's victims were smuggled abroad and published in English translation. Some of these books played a critical role in shaping the Cold War: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, First Circle, and Cancer Ward; Anatoly Sharansky's Fear No Evil; Evgeniia Ginzburg's Journey into the Whirlwind.Footnote 6 We also have extensive scholarship on some of these figures, including in Gennady Estraikh's book In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism, which addresses exactly writers who loved the Soviet state but whose love was not reciprocated.Footnote 7 Estraikh deals with some of the same figures (Kvitko, Markish, Itzik Fefer) who were repressed and, in these three cases, murdered. Additionally, the genre itself was transformed into fiction in the wonderful stories of Danilo Kiš, for example in A Tomb for Boris Davidovich.Footnote 8
The Dream of Social Justice and Bad Moral Luck may therefore seem anachronistic—after all, Stalin's repressions are well documented, so that a critic may ask where its novelty lies. To my mind, its novelty and its contribution lie in the victims’ self-expression. Nakhimovksy transmits their thoughts and relays inner monologues and conversations as if she had been there. If such techniques detract from academic objectivity, her skills heighten the reader's identification and interest, an estimable value in its own right.
Marat Grinberg's innovative book is set in a slightly later period, the Nikita Krushchev and especially Leonid Brezhnev years, when Jews came under state persecution that affected educational prospects and professional success. Like Nakhimovsky, Grinberg is interested in the experience of individual Jews themselves. He explains the formation of Jewish consciousness of the majority of second and third generation Soviet Jews, who were secular and unfamiliar with Jewish practices. Most Soviet Jews did not join a Jewish club or attend synagogue. However, because of the specifically Jewish liabilities placed on them by the state and by popular antisemitism, many were prompted to interrogate their Jewish identity; paradoxically antisemitism made them eager to know something about Judaism. Where could they find out?
A scholar of literature, Grinberg emphasizes culture. He writes:
The Soviet Jewish bookshelf creates what Lauren Berlant calls an “intimate public”—that is, a public “constituted by strangers who consume common texts and things” and who share “collective dimensions of intimacy.” Thus, by its very nature, this book on private bookshelves relies on very personal memories and the recollections of others in an endeavor to capture the communal experience of book reading. Inescapably, my own memories, reflections, experiences, and intuition play a role here, joining the individual with the collective and the intimate with the scholarly and the critical (11).
It is provocative to establish a relationship between the intimate self and the collective through the idea of books as lodestars of Jewish identity. While most books on Jews and Judaism—such as the Tanakh (Bible)—were off-limits to Soviet citizens, other books were available, such as the historical novels of Leon Freuchtwanger, fiction about Odessa by Isaak Babel΄ and Il΄f and Petrov, translations of Sholem Aleichem, and contemporary fiction by such writers as Ruf Zernova and Iurii Trifonov. Additionally, Grinberg notes that perceptive readers could “read through the lines” and glean information from anti-Zionist tracts as well as gain knowledge about Jews in the panoramic Soviet periodical press. Grinberg describes specific Jewish readings of the press during Israel's Six Day War, for example (25–26). A search in all corners reveals literature about Jews in the Soviet Union—previously thought of as an arid desert—to have been a lush oasis.
Admittedly, the overall impression of Jews and Judaism would be distorted if one had recourse solely to these haphazard sources. In his well-known and debated formulation, Zvi Gitelman would call this Jewish identity “thin” in contrast to “thick.”Footnote 9 Grinberg probably would not argue with Gitelman, but he maintains an optimistic stance. Although one's thirst was unlikely to be fully slaked by these books, one could begin to form a picture that would lead the reader to greater affection for and identification with things Jewish.
Is Grinberg's thesis convincing? In many senses, the book is similar to Anna Shternshis's studies, in which she claims that the break in Jewish continuity in Soviet Russia worked to create a new identity in the late-Soviet period. In her book Soviet and Kosher, for example, she shows that Jews were confused about what constituted Halachic Jewishness (dietary laws, for example).Footnote 10 Like Shternshis, Grinberg's Soviet Jew is one who burrows deep into the world of Jews with little memory of religion and little interest in risking his or her career by contacting the Zionist underground or reading samizdat. In the context of Soviet Jewry, however, it is important to recall other, “braver” Jews, too, even if there were fewer of them. One might mention the work of Mikhail Beizer, who has written about Jewish dissidents, Zionists, Hebrew teachers, and students who, while preparing themselves for emigration to Israel, educated themselves from more reliable sources.Footnote 11 Then one might contrast both Grinberg and Beizer with Yuri Slezkine, who, in his book The Jewish Century, celebrated assimilation, depicting communists of Jewish background who expressed their Jewishness through intellectualism, possessing full sets of Aleksandr Pushkin's poetry and knowing the books by heart. Ultimately, the question remains, why did some Jews fully assimilate into Soviet culture? Could all Jews ever be integrated fully into Soviet society, or was there something that kept them apart from the larger Soviet “Brotherhood of Peoples”?Footnote 12
Criticisms do not detract from this innovative and refreshing book. Unable to express selfhood publicly, it stands to reason that Jews in the Soviet Union sought other ways to engage. The books and bookshelf reflect an unnoticed dimension of material culture, draw our attention to reading habits and to intimate personal spaces that one could share with family and friends. Those intimate places are where Soviet people made home. Grinberg has brilliantly formulated new ways to understand Jewishness in Russia.
These two books inevitably raise theoretical issues about Jews in ideological empires, such as the Soviet Union. I wish that I could apply Marsha Rozenblit's thesis, as well as that of the great Columbia scholar Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi that Jews tend toward loyalty to the state in empires since their minority size and ability to acculturate to a non-ethnic identity give them incentives to embrace the empire's ideology. However, because of antisemitism in Soviet Russia, Jews did not develop as strong a loyalty as one might have expected.Footnote 13
On Jewish identity in the Brezhnev years, my view runs closer to Olga Litvak's: I regard Soviet Jews as part of a long tradition of Marranos, Jews who partially remembered and had partially forgot their selfhood as members of the Jewish religion and culture. We know of many such people in Europe, America, and elsewhere, who sometimes discover their family secret as adults and sometimes do not pay attention to what they already know. Such Jews live like others, but understand that they are different. The comparison is apt because just as with real Marranos, so here, too, when the period of obligatory hiding ended, some decided to join the body of the Jewish people, while others accepted membership in other groups.Footnote 14
These two books make contributions to cultural studies, although both authors were trained as literary scholars. Literary studies provide excellent training for examining the nexus of politics, identity, and material culture. The analysis of life as a text has proven to be fertile ground for understanding the liminal space between the humanities and social sciences. Despite the end of the Soviet Union now over three decades ago, we are still grappling with how to describe what went on there. These books are useful guides. I recommend their use to scholars of all levels.
